Vince Cable wants a universal Netflix catalogue for the EU

It’s no big secret that the country you currently reside in is the determining factor in which Netflix catalogue you can actually watch, and if you go abroad you gain access to a completely different selection of programming. Vince Cable doesn’t like that.

Speaking in Brussels, the UK Business Secretary said that services like Netflix and Spotify should be available in the same form across all EU member states. That means the same content, the same pricing, and readily available to everyone who pays for it.

That seems all well and good, but Cable didn’t specify how this system should be implemented. At the moment rights holder stagger releases to help maximise profits, and different regions have different distribution rights. Shaking up that system and combining all EU territories into one distribution region is likely to be rather tricky for both rights holders and distributors alike.

Cable claims that it could help boost the Eurozone economy by €340bn (£261bn), as well as making prices fairer across the EU.

Could it work? The variety of European languages would certainly make a universal catalogue more complicated, possibly requiring a setting that lets users decide what language they want their content to be in. Wouldn’t it just be easier for everyone if users just used a VPN if they go abroad?